A restless debut novel about adolescence, family and art.

Fifteen-year-old Monk lives in Melbourne's Chinatown with her father, a former art teacher whose ambitions have curdled into bitterness, and Santa Coy, an aspiring artist whose arrival disrupts their already weird-as domestic arrangement.

Told through fragmented scenes, internet conversations, sharp observations and bursts of surreal humour, Pink Mountain on Locust Island captures the disorienting experience of growing up among adults who are frequently no better equipped to understand the world than their children. Lau's prose moves between the mundane and the absurd, finding something unsettling in everyday exchanges, artistic pretension and the small cruelties of family life. An inventive work of Australian experimental fiction, especially interesting for readers drawn to unconventional narrative forms, alienation and the strange inner lives of young people.

Brow Books, 2018. First edition paperback. Good condition, with visible surface wear and light creasing to the covers.